In an interview set to air Tuesday night on HBO's Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel, the former Olympic sprinter Tim Montgomery reveals that his performance-enhancing drug use went beyond just his involvement in BALCO.Montgomery now says he took testosterone and human growth hormone before the Sydney Olympics, and as a result, he and his Olympic relay teammates -- Jon Drummond, Bernard Williams, Brian Lewis, Maurice Greene and Kenneth Brokenburr -- will likely be stripped of their gold medals.
"I have a gold medal that I'm sitting on that I didn't get with my own ability," Montgomery told Gumbel. "I'm not here to take away from anybody else's accomplishments, only my own. And I must say, I apologize to the other people that was on the relay team if that was to happen."
Everyone at the International Olympic Committee will, of course, condemn Montgomery, but they ought to take a lesson from Montgomery's admission: Olympic drug testing is woefully ineffective.
Montgomery (who also told Gumbel he regularly used marijuana) is just the latest example of the scores of Olympic athletes who made it through the Games without testing positive, only to admit much later that they were using drugs the whole time. Olympic athletes get away with using drugs because the drug testing doesn't work.
